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The main theme running through this text is that coherence is a mental phenomenon rather than a property of the spoken or written text, or of the social situation Coherence emerges during speech production-and-comprehension, allowing the speech receiver to form roughly the same episodic representation as the speech producer had in mind. In producing and comprehending a text, be it spoken or written, the interlocutors collaborate towards coherence. They negotiate for a common ground of shared topicality, reference and thematic structure thus toward a similar mental representation of the text. In conversation, the negotiation takes place between the present participants. In writing or oral narrative, the negotiation takes place in the mind of the text producer, between the text producer and his/her mental representation of the mind of the absent or inactive interlocutor. The cognitive mechanisms that underlie face-to-face communication thus continue to shape text production and comprehension in non-interactive contexts. Most of the papers in this volume were originally presented at the Symposium on Coherence in Spontaneous Text, held at the University of Oregon in the spring of 1992..
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The concept of semantic roles has been central to linguistic theory for many decades More specifically, the assumption of such representations as mediators in the correspondence between a linguistic form and its associated meaning has helped to address a number of critical issues related to grammatical phenomena. Furthermore, in addition to featuring in all major theories of grammar, semantic (or 'thematic') roles have been referred to extensively within a wide range of other linguistic subdisciplines, including language typology and psycho-/neurolinguistics.

This volume brings together insights from these different perspectives and thereby, for the first time, seeks to build upon the obvious potential for cross-fertilisation between hitherto autonomous approaches to a common theme. To this end, a view on semantic roles is adopted that goes beyond the mere assumption of generalised roles, but also focuses on their hierarchical organisation. The book is thus centred around the interdisciplinary examination of how these hierarchical dependencies subserve argument linking - both in terms of linguistic theory and with respect to real-time language processing - and how they interact with other information types in this process. Furthermore, the contributions examine the interaction between the role hierarchy and the conceptual content of (generalised) semantic roles and investigate their cross-linguistic applicability and psychological reality, as well as their explanatory potential in accounting for phenomena in the domain of language disorders.

In bridging the gap between different disciplines, the book provides a valuable overview of current thought on semantic roles and argument linking, and may further serve as a point of departure for future interdisciplinary research in this area. As such, it will be of interest to scientists and advanced students in all domains of linguistics and cognitive science..
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The twenty-one papers that make up this volume reflect the broad perspective of African linguistic topology studies today. Where previous volumes would present language material from a very restricted area and perspective, the present contributions reflect the global interest and orientation of current African linguistic studies. The studies are nearly all implicational in nature. Based upon a detailed survey of a particular linguistic phenomenon in a given language or language area conclusions are drawn about the general nature about this phenomenon in the languages of Africa and beyond. They represent as such a first step that may ultimately lead to a more thorough understanding of African linguistic structures. This approach is well justified. Taking the other road, attempting to pick out linguistic details from often fairly superficially documented languages runs the risk that the data and its implications for the structure investigated might be misunderstood. Consequentially only very few studies of this nature giving the very broad perspective, the overview of a particular structure type covering the whole African continent are represented here..
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Relating Events in Narrative, Volume 2: Typological and Contextual Perspectives edited by Sven Strömqvist and Ludo Verhoeven, is the much anticipated follow-up volume to Ruth Berman and Dan Slobin's successful "frog-story studies" book, Relating Events in Narrative: A Crosslinguistic Developmental Study (1994).


Working closely with Ruth Berman and Dan Slobin, the new editors have brought together a wide range of scholars who, inspired by the 1994 book, have all used Mercer Mayer's Frog, Where Are You? as a basis for their research. The new book, which is divided into two parts, features a broad linguistic and cultural diversity. Contributions focusing on crosslinguistic perspectives make up the first part of the book. This part is concluded by Dan Slobin with an analysis and overview discussion of factors of linguistic typology in frog-story research.


The second part offers a variety of theoretical and methodological perspectives, all dealing with contextual variation of narrative construction in a wide sense: variation across medium/modality (speech, writing, signing), genre variation (the specific frog story narrative compared to other genres), frog story narrations from the perspective of theory of mind, and from the perspective of bilingualism and second language acquisition. Several of the contributions to the new book manuscript also deal with developmental perspectives, but, in distinction to the 1994 book, that is not the only focused issue. The second part is initiated by Ruth Berman with an analysis of the role of context in developing narrative abilities.


The new book represents a rich overview and illustration of recent advances in theoretical and methodological approaches to the crosslinguistic study of narrative discourse. A red thread throughout the book is that crosslinguistic variation is not merely a matter of variation in form, but also in content and aspects of cognition. A recurrent perspective on language and thoughtis that of Dan Slobin's theory of "thinking for speaking," an approach to cognitive consequences of linguistic diversity. The book ends with an epilogue by Herbert Clark, "Variations on a Ranarian Theme."
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